2013 VDare.com Anthology

By VDare Foundation

The VDare.com 2013 Anthology features articles and blog posts from VDare.com on topics including: Illegal Aliens; Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman; and Britain and Immigration. All from the web's most inclusive journal on immigration and the National Question.

• Language: English
• Publisher: VDARE.
• Release date: Jul 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312126794

Book preview

Introduction to the Eighth Annual

VDARE.com Anthology

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By James Kirkpatrick

Contributor, VDARE.com

These days, paper represents permanence. In an age dominated by texting, Twitter, and Tumblr, to publish (really publish!) an anthology means that you are saying something intended to endure. The eighth VDARE.com Anthology is just that—a statement that the immigration patriotism cause is here to stay, and goes beyond just stopping amnesty one more time. It’s a whole school of thought that is deconstructing—and creating alternatives to—the oppressive climate of Political Correctness.

Perhaps this is a bit much even for a time dominated by overstatement and exaggeration. After all, we’re used to hearing each new movie trailer or sitcom advertisement described as epic, so words tend to lose their meaning these days.

But we are entering, as the Chinese would say, interesting times. While the Internet broke open a whole new venue of debate for ideas and information, it had the unintended effect of strengthening the means of repression. Increasingly, patriotic speakers, writers, and activists find it difficult to appear even on talk radio, never mind television. And a host of self-appointed watchdogs, tenured academics, and (most worryingly) government busybodies grow ever bolder in chipping away at the First Amendment rights of Americans. For that reason, real paper books are becoming more important, not less. They cannot be blocked by hostile gatekeepers, destroyed by hackers, or tracked by government or corporate spies. Indeed, the new samizdat may, like the old, rely entirely on paper if the enemies of free speech have their way.

Therefore, I think it’s fitting that we start this anthology by looking back to the publication of Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow’s 1995 bestseller on immigration issues. The first article in this anthology (p. 3) is the new foreword that he has written for the 2013 Kindle Edition. It provides a fascinating look at the context in which Alien Nation was written, the defeat (or betrayal) of immigration patriotism, and the future of the National Question.

However, just because we are looking back to paper doesn’t mean we are ignoring technology. 2013 saw the first ever VDARE.com webinar, which brought together donors, supporters, and writers both in Boston and around the world through video technology. You will find most of the presentations in this volume, as each represented an attempt to take on a major aspect of what the historic American nation is facing.

John Derbyshire’s address (p. 15) serves as a useful introduction to the National Question and the role of dissidents, journalists, and, well, dissident journalists at a time when truth is under attack. More importantly, he provides a theoretical framework and an interesting (and entertaining) way to analyze and experience a political climate that seems to have gone insane.

Viewed from this perspective, you can see why issues like gun control are really issues about who rather than what. As James Fulford contends in his webinar speech (p. 28), gun control, like immigration law, is only enforced against those who obey it. Like so many other things, it has become an example of what the late Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny.

Steve Sailer challenged the conventional wisdom by describing how the Republican Party’s real crisis is its low share of the white vote (p. 47). More importantly, he provided the real evidence to show why amnesty is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder for Republicans. His presentation is invaluable in combating the usual tired rhetoric about why Republicans need to pass amnesty.

As for my own contribution (p. 33), I outline how the American conservative movement has failed, is failing, and if there is not an alternative, will take the historic American nation down with it. I present an alternative platform for Americans willing to transcend the Beltway Right and build a new movement.

The necessity of this new movement was made clear even to the most optimistic observers following the shameful performance of some of Conservatism Inc.’s most important writers and activists in 2013.

One of the most important scandals was the dismissal of scholar Jason Richwine from the Heritage Foundation after left-wing media shrieked about his thesis at Harvard University. His thesis, which his employers certainly knew about before he was hired, focused on the implications of race and IQ. As John Derbyshire shows (p. 70), his termination is a disturbing glimpse of the triumph of ideology over reality. Patrick Cleburne also has a troubling article (p. 81) about the sinister motivations of one of the Republican Party’s most influential donors.

The libertarians aren’t much better. Alexander Hart traces the fall of Jack Hunter (p. 76), the erstwhile Southern Avenger. While he once wrote on issues of immigration and Political Correctness, Hunter dramatically abased himself before multiculturalism in order to protect the nascent Presidential aspirations of Senator Rand Paul.

Editor-in-chief Peter Brimelow describes and explains the moral foundation of this kind of cowardice in ‘Hitler’s Revenge’ and Donor Riots (p. 85). Americans (and Westerners in general) feel that it is morally unacceptable to have a rational discussion on immigration because of its racial implications. Of course, this sense of moral superiority is backed up by donors lusting for cheap labor—a strange kind of egalitarian posturing.

This kind of cowardice is even more inexcusable when viewing the quiet racial war being waged outside the Beltway. Nicholas Stix points out that it is blacks who call what is happening war (p. 97)—and maybe whites should actually start listening to them.

Part of this war is what Peter Brimelow calls the Minority Occupation Government of the Obama Administration, which has proved itself not just unwilling to enforce immigration laws, but positively eager to violate the laws in order to facilitate America’s demographic transformation. VDARE’s own Federale, in a critical piece (p. 107), highlights how the Obama Administration is unilaterally (and illegally) imposing Administrative Amnesty—with the silence of the Republicans.

James Fulford, in his article on the Ugly Roots of Open Borders enthusiasts, flips the script on the anti-American reporters eager to paint immigration patriots as racists (p. 113). He shows that unlimited immigration enthusiasm is driven by a deep anti-American, anti-white bias.

Unfortunately, to be politically conscious in modern America is to be aware that America is already splintering apart—what Pat Buchanan once called a secession of the heart. For proof, look no further than the diametrically opposed views most blacks and whites and most progressives and conservatives held over George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin. As Nicholas Stix points out (p. 125), much of the rhetoric and arguments surrounding the case were produced purely for show. The African-American community’s problems go far deeper than the latest media circus.

Of course, it’s hard to keep track of this when every week there is a new media frenzy over racism. Paul Kersey describes the national hysteria over Paula Deen (p. 131), who supposedly said a racial slur decades ago and therefore had her current career destroyed. He points out that this kind of media shaming will only continue until someone in a position of strength decides they have had enough.

More importantly, the climate of Political Correctness isn’t just about having to watch what you say or avoiding a public relations disaster. It is destroying some of our greatest cities. In one of the most powerful—and tragic—pieces here, Kersey outlines the fate of Detroit, once the Paris of the West, now just another failed Third World city (p. 137).

Fear over speaking racial realities means that racial undercurrents express themselves through the culture in strange ways. Social networking has made television programming a racial minefield, as insensitive comments or insufficient diversity (read: not enough non-whites) provides an opening for shows to be attacked or taken off the air. At the same time, most white Americans want to watch shows with characters that they can relate to.

Thus, we offer two pieces on some of the odder pop culture phenomena. Timothy Barnett dissects HBO’s Girls (p. 142), one of the most analyzed and acclaimed television series of our time, especially among urban, liberal whites. Ironically, despite the enthusiastic leftism of the show’s creators (and viewers), the show is naturally accused of being too white. Matthew Richer brings a critical eye to The Bachelor (p. 148), a guilty pleasure for many Americans. Richer points out that the show is a virtual whitopia, along with many other popular programs.

But we haven’t forgotten VDARE’s core mission to analyze immigration policy. Don Collins, a Democrat, demolishes the usual Open Borders clichés used to justify amnesty (p. 159). Peter Brimelow takes a hammer (p. 164) to the infuriatingly false slogan that Republicans can pass amnesty and get the immigration issue behind them. And Allan Wall, who knows Mexico far better than our rulers, takes down Lindsey Graham’s insane claim (p. 169) that Open Borders are required to salvage people from the Mexican hellhole.

As a final piece, we offer Steve Sailer’s devastating satire (p. 174), The Upcoming Bomb Brother Trial: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dzhokhar. This brilliant piece is a kind of gallows humor for an entire society, with a sarcastic take on how the media may cover the trial of the surviving Muslim terrorist from the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

After all, if there’s one lesson to be taken from 2013, it’s that sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.

We’re proud to offer the 2013 VDARE Anthology as a permanent contribution to the critical debates of our time. In an age when all seems transient, may it serve as a foundation to build upon for the patriotic movement.

ARTICLES

I Believe I Will Be at Least Exempted from ‘The Curses of Those Who Come After’ Foreword to the 2013 Kindle Edition of Alien Nation

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By Peter Brimelow

By a curious coincidence, I began writing the Foreword to this Kindle edition of Alien Nation exactly seventeen years to the day since I wrote the Afterword to the original paperback edition—just before Christmas 1995.¹

(For the Kindle edition, we have moved the Afterword so that it follows directly after these remarks, and is in turn followed by what now seems like an amazing series of laudatory quotations from reviews by people who would now probably like to deny it.)

(I never liked the title, by the way. I wanted to call the book Electing a New People after the now-famous Brecht poem. And I still think that would have been better. But imposing titles on authors seems to give commercial publishers their moment of creative thrill.)

The Alien Nation Afterword remains my most productive spasm in forty years in professional journalism: about 7,000 words in thirty straight hours.

I remember that, most of that day and into the night, I was looking out through my office window into an intense Connecticut Berkshire snowstorm, with a row of birds perched unmoving on a power line, fluffed up against the intense cold. I felt sorry for them and wondered how they could survive—not realizing, of course, that they would prove a pretty good symbol of the ordeal of immigration patriots in the coming years.

The blazing red dawn revealed a subzero winter wonderland—and a family of deer legally immigrated into our yard to claim asylum under a yew hedge.

The Afterword was so easy to write because I’d been composing answers to Alien Nation’s critics in my head throughout that intense year of book promotion. The Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said that he wrote an entire book in his head while a prisoner in the Gulag. I now believe that this can be done.

Plus the writing was easy because, incredible though it may now seem, at the end of 1995 the cause of patriotic immigration reform seemed so obviously on the verge of victory. (We now call it patriotic immigration reform to distinguish immigration reduction and rationalization from the…other kind of reform, Amnesty, plus a massive cheap-labor pig-out, whose advocates have hijacked the perfectly innocent term immigration reform in their typically disingenuous way.)

Intellectually, the immigration enthusiasts were utterly routed, unable to respond to the sudden refutation of clichés upon which they had relied for years—except with personal abuse, which I viewed with contempt.

Nearly two decades later, this is still the case—but, alas, I have learned in the interim that mud really does stick.

Politically, everything had fallen into place. As I described in the Afterword, the Jordan Commission reported mid-year, recommending serious cutbacks in legal immigration—and President Bill Clinton endorsed its recommendations. The Republicans controlled both the U.S. House and the Senate, so the passage of the Smith-Simpson bill, which embodied the Jordan recommendations, seemed inevitable. Even Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, more recently Sheldon Adelson’s catspaw in the 2012 presidential primaries, had sponsored a bipartisan task force on illegal immigration that, among other things, recommended ending birthright citizenship.

In addition, the 1996 Presidential Election was less than a year away. President Clinton was widely assumed to be mortally wounded after his party had lost control of Congress in 1994. And among the GOP contenders was Patrick J. Buchanan, in my opinion the outstanding political thinker of the era, who actually understood the immigration issue and had the courage and the ability to use it.

Well…it didn’t work out that way. To cut a distressing story short:

In early 1996, Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary—but, assailed with a concatenated barrage of abuse unprecedented since the 1964 Goldwater campaign, was subsequently isolated and snuffed out.

As the columnist Lars-Erik Nelson, one of the small but honorable group of liberals who have recognized the reality of current immigration policy’s immiseration of the working class, said to me after we both appeared on the CSPAN morning show: All the money in the world would have come down on [Buchanan] had he won the subsequent Arizona primary (which he initially appeared to have done). Nelson’s premature death in 2000, like that of Barbara Jordan in 1996, was one of a long series of unpredictable misfortunes that have befallen the cause of patriotic immigration reform.

I must say, however, that I regard Buchanan’s insistence on prioritizing the undeniable but less significant downside of free trade, the subject of his 1998 book The Great Betrayal, as not the least of these misfortunes.

In mid-1996, an unholy alliance of Leftists, ethnic lobbyists, libertarian loonies, Chamber of Commerce cheap labor whores, and neoconservative ideologues succeeded in derailing the Smith-Simpson bill.

As it turned out, this was the last moment when patriotic immigration reform was on the offensive. Every single battle in the long years since then has been defensive.

The cause of patriotic immigration reform has always faced formidable odds. But I will state here my view that even its pitifully small stock of assets has been significantly mishandled by its putative leaders.

The GOP’s presidential nominee Bob Dole threw away the immigration issue in the 1996 Presidential election, even selecting the notoriously bone-headed immigration enthusiast Jack Kemp for vice-president. They lost.

In mid-1997, effective early 1998, William F. Buckley abruptly and secretly fired John O’Sullivan as Editor of National Review.

This ended the brief period, beginning with my 1992 cover story, when National Review dared to challenge the uncritical pro-immigration consensus among neoconservatives/‌libertarians/‌business lobbies/‌congressional Republicans and their donors (where distinguishable) etc.…what we now call Conservatism Inc. As Wall Street Journal Editor Robert L. Bartley later gloated (July 3, 2000), the magazine promptly stopped stridently claiming opposition to immigration as a conservative cause.

Of course, this was irritating to me personally. I was instantly constructively dismissed, as labor lawyers call it, in the effeminate Buckley style—via a snail-mail letter from O’Sullivan’s protégé and parricidal successor Rich Lowry extruding me from the magic circle of Senior Editors, although I remained as camouflage on NR’s masthead for several further years. And I knew by then that immigration was a Third Rail issue not just for the Left but in the nominally conservative and/or business-oriented parts of the Mainstream Media where I earned a humble living. (As indeed it has proved to be.)

But I do think Buckley’s betrayal had wider significance. As Neal Freeman later observed in an American Spectator article ("NR Goes to War," June 2006)² on the end of his 38-year membership of the NR Board because of the magazine’s slavish support of the catastrophic Iraq invasion:

I thought then and I think today that if NR had opposed the invasion it could have made a decisive difference within the conservative movement and, radiating its influence outward, across the larger political community.

Similarly, I believe that, had National Review maintained over the subsequent fifteen years the immigration line that O’Sullivan and I pioneered, the Republican Party—and America—might not now be facing demographic disaster.

Buckley is incessantly credited with the making of the post-World War II American conservative movement. But he must also be held complicit in its breaking—and, perhaps, the breaking of the American nation.

The whole experience was a microcosm of the immigration debate: critical arguments are never met, they are simply repressed—along with, if possible, the heretics who make them. After 1998, there was once again literally nowhere in the MSM where facts and analyses critical of Establishment immigration enthusiasm could appear.

Fortunately, the internet came along, and we launched our immigration patriot website, VDARE.com, on Christmas Eve 1999.

2001-2013: The Amnesty Wars

The fifteen years since the nobbling of National Review have been a brutal demonstration of the brilliant insight of RealClearPolitics.com’s Sean Trende: The Democratic Party is a coalition of interest groups dominated by an ideological faction; the Republican Party is a coalition of ideological factions dominated by an interest group.

Repeatedly, beginning directly after George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2000, the GOP elite has tried to impose, not just a repeat of the 1986 Amnesty for illegal aliens but also a repeat of the 1965 Immigration Act’s massive increase in legal immigration, upon its base of ordinary patriotic Americans.

Only the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and unprecedented grass-roots revolt in 2006 and 2007, have stalled these lavishly-funded drives. And, at this writing, the fate of the 2013 Amnesty/‌Immigration Surge bill is still unclear.

I must admit that I did not anticipate this extraordinary GOP elite stubbornness—nor its suicidal stupidity. In the last cover story I did for National Review (The Emerging Democratic Majority: Electing a New People, June 16, 1997),³ co-author Edwin S. Rubenstein and I laid out the devastating incremental impact of prevailing non-traditional immigration on the GOP (or what we more recently have called GAP—the Generic American Party, the political expression of America’s historic white majority). Subsequently, on VDARE.com, we have exhaustively documented this effect and what can be done about it. (Basically, end immigration and mobilize the white vote—the latter an option we call the Sailer Strategy, after Steve Sailer, who first developed it on VDARE.com in 2001.)

Again, our arguments were never challenged—they were simply ignored. Only in the spring of 2013 have I begun to see even minimal Mainstream Media discussion of the decisive importance of the white vote—which, of course, until the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act, would have been described as the American vote.

In retrospect, the plain fact is that, even more than in most political conflicts, immigration enthusiasts are simply not arguing in good faith. They have hidden agendas that they will not—in fact cannot—acknowledge.

The most obvious example: the business lobby. In Alien Nation, I had reported the consensus analysis of the economics of immigration, which was subsequently confirmed in 1997 by the National Research Council’s The New Americans, the economic appendix to the Jordan Commission. The aggregate benefit to native-born Americans from the post-1965 immigration influx is vanishingly small, maybe one-tenth of one percent of GDP. And that’s wiped out by the additional taxes Americans pay to subsidize immigrants’ use of schools and other government services.

But, although immigration doesn’t benefit Americans in aggregate, it does benefit some Americans—at the expense of others. It does this by increasing competition for jobs and thereby depressing wages. The accepted estimate is that immigration redistributes some 2 to 3 percent of GDP from labor to the owners of capital. In 2013, that’s about $300 billion-$450 billion, a very large number.

This explains the extraordinary parade of plutocrats—for example, Sheldon Adelson, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Paul Singer, the Koch brothers—currently pushing the 2013 Amnesty/‌Immigration Surge bill and the enormous amount of money they are spending on it. ($1.5 billion since late 2007 by one account, and that doesn’t include their 2013 splurge.)

Basically, these plutocrats are demanding that the U.S. government divert more of Americans’ income to them. When Americans hear that immigration will spur economic growth, they should read: Permit more plutocrat plundering of America’s middle and working class.

There’s a huge amount of money at stake. By depressing wages, current immigration policy shifts some 2-3 percent of Gross Domestic Product from labor to capital. That’s a windfall profit to the plutocrats of $300-$450 billion a year.

And remember, the 2013 Amnesty/‌Immigration Surge bill could triple legal immigration. So we could be looking at a diversion of income to the plutocrats amounting to more than a trillion dollars.

A year or so of that, and you can renounce your American citizenship and move to some tax haven (as, for example, Zuckerberg’s co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, has done—he now lives in Singapore).

This is a looting of the U.S. economy that can only be compared to the Russian oligarchs’ theft of assets as the Soviet Union collapsed. But at least those assets were impersonally owned by the State. The income that America’s oligarchs are redistributing to themselves were previously supporting the lifestyle of the broad mass of Americans.

In effect, American politics have entered a new Gilded Age, with politicians all too eager to do the bidding of high-tech Robber Barons. The New York Times token conservative columnist Ross Douthat has accurately described this as The Republican Party’s ‘Donorism’ Problem [March 6, 2013].⁴ Whether this